Microsoft Updates Office Online With Tell Me, Commenting And More

Back in February Microsoft rebranded Office Web Apps to Office Online. Following the move, today it announced a set of new features for the web apps. This update brings features such as Tell Me, printing, commenting and more to Office Online, all of which will start rolling out to users today. Its now available in the Chrome Web Store as well. People who use the Chrome browser can add Word Online, PowerPoint Online and OneNote Online to their Chrome App launchers, thus being able to create new Office documents online with a single click. Excel Online will be coming shortly.

Word Online users get ability to edit comments as well as insert footnotes and endnotes inline. Its “smarter” now when it comes to list making. If they’re directly below an existing numbered list and start typing the next line becomes part of the list automatically, the feature is already present on the desktop Word.

Microsoft has added the ability to insert new comments as well as edit and delete existing comments to Excel Online. It also gets improved support for files containing VBA. Users can now open and edit VBA-enabled spreadsheets without removing or corrupting the VBA contained within. Tell ME, a feature that lets you tell the app what to do, also comes to Excel Online. Relevant commands are displayed in a drop-down list so users can perform actions right away.

In PowerPoint Online the text editor has been re-engineered so that when users are editing slides, the layout looks more like the final result. Performance and video playback optimizations have also been made by speeding up advancement of slides in the editor. PowerPoint online gets the ability to play embedded YouTube videos as well.

Last but not the least, OneNote Online gets multi-column section or page navigation. Users asked for the ability to print and Microsoft has listened. They can now print notes from the online app with just one click. As previously mentioned, all updates start rolling out to users today.